Aybüke Aurum

Engineering and Managing Software Requirements

1) Requirements Engineering: Setting the Context Part-1: State-of-the-Art Surveys of Requirements Engineering Process Research 2) Requirements Elicitation 3) Specification of Requirements Models 4) Requirements Prioritization 5) Requirements Interdependencies 6) Impact Analysis 7) Requirements Negotiation 8) Quality Assurance in Requirements Engineering Part-2: The Next Practice in Requirements Engineering 9) Modeling Goals and Reasoning with Them 10) Managing Large Repositories of Natural Language Requirements 11) Understanding Ambiguity in Requirements Engineering 12) Decision Support in Requirements Engineering 13) Market-Driven Requirements Engineering for Software Products 14) Requirements Engineering for Agile Methods 15) Requirements Engineering for Web-Based Information Systems Part-3: Studies and Industrial Experience 16) Requirements Engineering: A Case of Developing and Managing Quality Software Systems in the Public Sector 17) Good Quality Requirements in Unified Process 18) Requirements Experience in Practice: Studies of Six Companies 19) An Analysis of Empirical Requirements Survey Data 20) Requirements Engineering: Solutions and Trends

State-of-the-Art: Software Inspections after 25 Years

Software inspections, which were originally developed by Michael Fagan in 1976, are an important means to verify and achieve sufficient quality in many software projects today. Since Fagans initial work, the importance of software inspections has been long recognized by software developers and many organizations. Various proposals have been made by researchers in the hope of improving Fagans inspection method. The proposals include structural changes to the process and several types of support for the inspection process. Most of the proposals have been empirically investigated in different studies.

The fundamental nature of requirements engineering activities as a decision-making process

The requirements engineering (RE) process is a decision-rich complex problem solving activity. This paper examines the elements of organization-oriented macro decisions as well as process-oriented micro decisions in the RE process and illustrates how to integrate classical decision-making models with RE process models. This integration helps in formulating a common vocabulary and model to improve the manageability of the RE process, and contributes towards the learning process by validating and verifying the consistency of decision-making in RE activities.

An exploration of technical debt

Context: Whilst technical debt is considered to be detrimental to the long term success of software development, it appears to be poorly understood in academic literature. The absence of a clear definition and model for technical debt exacerbates the challenge of its identification and adequate management, thus preventing the realisation of technical debts utility as a conceptual and technical communication device. Objective: To make a critical examination of technical debt and consolidate understanding of the nature of technical debt and its implications for software development. Method: An exploratory case study technique that involves multivocal literature review, supplemented by interviews with software practitioners and academics to establish the boundaries of the technical debt phenomenon. Result: A key outcome of this research is the creation of a theoretical framework that provides a holistic view of technical debt comprising a set of technical debts dimensions, attributes, precedents and outcomes, as well as the phenomenon itself and a taxonomy that describes and encompasses different forms of the technical debt phenomenon. Conclusion: The proposed framework provides a useful approach to understanding the overall phenomenon of technical debt for practical purposes. Future research should incorporate empirical studies to validate heuristics and techniques that will assist practitioners in their management of technical debt.

Investigating Knowledge Management practices in software development organisations - An Australian experience

This study, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, investigates current practice of Knowledge Management (KM) in Software Engineering (SE) processes in two Australian companies on the basis that they both claimed to apply KM practices in their software development work. It also describes the KM activities and KM process used in SE practice, and examines the enablers of KM process for SE in terms of leadership, technology, culture, process and measurement. One of the main findings showed that software developers believe in the usefulness of knowledge sharing; however, their ability to utilise some of the KM systems was limited. The most commonly used systems included personal networks, informal networks, groupware and third-party knowledge. There is a need to formalise knowledge sharing of practices, while also supporting informal and ad-hoc knowledge sharing. While KM was considered to be important, the tools, techniques and methodologies currently employed for software development were inadequate to address effective management of knowledge in these organisations. In both organisations, a uniform model of the KM process did not exist. Among the four KM enablers, leadership was considered to be the most significant as top-down KM strategies were seemingly being pursued by management. Technology was also considered to be an obvious mechanism for KM, despite some of their current KM systems either being unsuitable or inaccessible. In addition, the crucial role that personal networks played in accessing tacit and implicit knowledge was seen as a key reason to foster a culture that encourages participants to share their knowledge with others.

Using students as subjects - an empirical evaluation

An important task in Requirements Engineering is to select which requirements that should go into a specific release of a system. This is a complex decision that requires balancing multiple perspectives against each other. In this article we investigate what students imagine is important to professionals in requirements selection. The reason for this is to understand whether the students are able to picture what industry professionals value, and whether the courses allow them to picture the state of industry practice. The results indicate that students have a good understanding of the way industry acts in the context of requirements selection, and students may work well as subjects in empirical studies in this area.

Tradeoff and Sensitivity Analysis in Software Architecture Evaluation Using Analytic Hierarchy Process

Software architecture evaluation involves evaluating different architecture design alternatives against multiple quality-attributes. These attributes typically have intrinsic conflicts and must be considered simultaneously in order to reach a final design decision. AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), an important decision making technique, has been leveraged to resolve such conflicts. AHP can help provide an overall ranking of design alternatives. However it lacks the capability to explicitly identify the exact tradeoffs being made and the relative size of these tradeoffs. Moreover, the ranking produced can be sensitive such that the smallest change in intermediate priority weights can alter the final order of design alternatives. In this paper, we propose several in-depth analysis techniques applicable to AHP to identify critical tradeoffs and sensitive points in the decision process. We apply our method to an example of a real-world distributed architecture presented in the literature. The results are promising in that they make important decision consequences explicit in terms of key design tradeoffs and the architectures capability to handle future quality attribute changes. These expose critical decisions which are otherwise too subtle to be detected in standard AHP results.

Antecedents to IT personnel's intentions to leave: A systematic literature review

This paper undertakes a systematic review to gain insight into existing studies on the turnover of information technology (IT) personnel. Our systematic review of 72 studies from 1980 to 2008 examines the background and trend of research into IT personnels intentions to leave their workplaces, in addition to providing a taxonomy of the determinants of their intentions to quit as captured in IT literature. We note a huge growth in the number of academic papers on the topic since 1998. Moreover, most of the research on IT turnover has been undertaken in North America, followed by Asia. Based on the 72 extracted studies, we found a total of 70 conceptually distinct IT turnover drivers. We classified them into the 5 broad categories of individual, organisational, job-related, psychological, and environmental, each containing three to four sub-categories. Finally, this paper presents insightful recommendations for IT practitioners as well as for the research community.

Challenges of shared decision-making: A multiple case study of agile software development

Context: Agile software development changes the nature of collaboration, coordination, and communication in software projects. Objective: Our objective was to understand the challenges of shared decision-making in agile software development teams. Method: We designed a multiple case study consisting of four projects in two software product companies that recently adopted Scrum. We collected data in semi-structured interviews, through participant observations, and from process artifacts. Results: We identified three main challenges to shared decision-making in agile software development: alignment of strategic product plans with iteration plans, allocation of development resources, and performing development and maintenance tasks in teams. Conclusion: Agile software development requires alignment of decisions on the strategic, tactical, and operational levels in order to overcome these challenges. Agile development also requires a transition from specialized skills to redundancy of functions and from rational to naturalistic decision-making. This takes time; the case companies needed from one to two years to change from traditional, hierarchical decision-making to shared decision-making in software development projects.

The Success Factors Powering Industry-Academia Collaboration

Collaboration between industry and academia supports improvement and innovation in industry and helps to ensure industrial relevance in academic research. This article presents an exploratory study of the factors for successful collaboration between industry and academia in software research.